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A curled kittytail has never been such a beautiful sight. It has been nearly three weeks since Ya-chan suffered a spinal injury and loss the ability to control his bladder, his sphincter and his tail. At first his recovery was in tiny steps. Almost imperceptible day by day. But now each day is lightyears better than the one before. And now instead of a dead appendage following him around his tail is one again the lively, expressive tail it used to be.

I like cross-stitch and I like physicists so why wouldn’t I like cross-stitches of physicists!? Larripin Labs has patterns for sale. The first up is Feynman. But I hear that others are coming soon; like Michio Kaku. How do I know this? Let’s say I have “insider” knowledge.

Lightning just struck the high power lines in front of my house. We’re sitting here listening to the rain and watching the storm coverage on tv when there’s a bright flash … loud thunder … loud humming and a shower of sparks down onto the median and the road.

From the little I can see out the front windows it doesn’t look like a line is down but they’re swinging in the wind pretty crazily.

I think one benefit of having those tall steel high power line towers in front of the house is that it’s VERY unlikely lightning will ever strike the house.

Marfa was fun. It was open-house weekend at Chinati and so we got to peruse what we missed last year. Donald Judd’s aluminum boxes were impressive. Ilya Kabakov’s “School No. 6″ felt like walking into a Solzhenitsyn novel. I overheard another visitor saying he’d brought a Russian friend there to see it and the guy freaked out because it seemed so authentic.

We also went to see Judd’s house in town which is really more like a miniature warehouse. There’s a really nice contemplative pool outside though which quite a few people were enjoying.

We also visited a couple of our favorite galleries, Gene Binder’s and Ballroom Marfa, while also checking out some new places. And, of course, we made the long drive out to the other side of Valentine to visit the Prada Marfa site. It looked great, but we found out later that it had been vandalized only a couple of days before.

Once again we stayed at the wonderful Holland Hotel in Alpine. We didn’t see Carla this visit but the nihilist was lurking around and the restaurant has been taken over by a couple of Bavarian guys. It’s Edelweiss now and besides serving authentic Bavarian food they’re a micro-brewery serving excellent Bavarian beer!

After arriving in town about 3pm on Friday Greta and I decide to take a nap in our room. Around 7-ish I wake up and hear this strange noise. “Greta, someone is playing a tuba in the hotel.” We go downstairs and find a German oompa band playing in the hotel lobby. IT’S OCTOBERFEST!!! Edelweiss is in full-swing and the place is packed. The beer is flowing. The waitresses are wearing traditional Bavarian dresses. There are beer-stein-holding strength contests. The oompa band is playing. Prost!!

Next year, I’m not sure about going back to Open House. But, Octoberfest in Alpine? No way I’m going to miss it!

Here it is, the new blog. Aviate :: Navigate :: Communicate … a good rule of thumb for flying and for other situations. Mostly I’ll be posting about my flying lessons and, once I have my license, my weekend adventures.